HERE AND NOW
The text of a talk given at parklands by Eugene Halliday, Ishval Audio 116
Track 1
Well actually we are talking about the here and the now and in order to define the here and now we must say what so far, philosophically, has been said about a space and time, because here is a concept and now is a time concept. And these two things cohere very nicely on a piece of printed music. I’ll draw you up a little stave, five lines with every good boy deserves a favour on them for those of you who remember those and within the spaces FACE. It illustrates very clearly the difficulty of the problem.
A piece of printed music contained space and time, and the space is represented, like most human inventions illogically, the wrong way. But there is a very intelligent firm in Holland called klavar schribel which means ‘piano writing’, writing for the keyboard and they print the music the other way round at right angles to the way orthodox people do it. And they do this because it is more logical. If we were to put the base clef here, five more lines, I won’t bother to do the rest, we’ll put a little line in the middle called the ledger lineand we call the ledger line between there, middle there middle C, that is middle C, around the middle of the piano, then we can see that if we were to turn the whole thing round this way and do our five lines like this, we could look at this stave very logically, we could print all the music this way round, we could put this middle C opposite the key on the piano, to right or left of that note on a line or in a space, and then we could immediately play the music without having to learn music, because we would then have a space diagram here representing the space of the keys, and our time diagram we could use vertically. We could print this on a rolling piece of paper, rather like this one and when we had to play a certain note, we could pull that note out of the way and play the next one, always play the one opposite the eye, and this would enable us to play immediately any music, within the capacity of our manual dexterity, at sight. This particular Dutch player, inspired by the simplicity of Esperanto, applied the same simple concepts and knowing tat this other the mode, the orthodox mode is really a space-time diagram, they just turned it round. Anybody can just read music immediately without any further lesson if they get a piece if they get a piece of ordinary music and just turn it over, so the lines are running vertically, and then take the little ledger line between, put it opposite the middle C., and then count to right or left of that note, and then play wherever there is a dot, put a finger. Put it opposite the middle C and then count to right or left of that note and play. Wherever there is a dot, put a finger, rather like a ukulele used to be played in the old days and some guitar music still is.
Now this illustrates a peculiar relation that on the same diagram we can show space and time.
Now I am going to dismiss klavar scribel for a moment and ask you all to sit for the next hour with your heads on one side like this so that you can get the same effect as you would get with the klavar-scribel writing but with a pain in the neck.You will find that this teaches you another thing about time that time always means energy expenditure, because you neck muscles will get tired and if you try to hold your head in that position for very long it will begin to ache. This is quite an important thing that time involves energy expenditure.
Track 2
Now let’s think about it, now that we have a space diagram here and a time diagram this way.When you are playing music you will turn your pages over this way and that’s probably easier than turning them over that way as they would tend to fall down again. But you have bars to divide the thing and you put, say in a waltz you have three beats, and you write those beats, we will say, like that, I shall shade them in. there are three crochets for youand we will count 1, 2, 3, and we might repeat that to reverse it 1,2,3, for the next bar. And we can imagine that if we put a finger on this note and then a finger on this note and then and then a finger on this note and so on, thisdirection represents time and this direction represents the space. We put a finger on E, a finger on G, a finger on B, the same finger on B, and then the finger we put on G there we put on G here, and the finger we put on E there we put on E here. And we are doing two things, spreading our fingers in space over the keyboard and we are counting time. We might find on a piece of music, sixty here with crochets = ( = 60) and that means you will count one second per crochet, sixty to the minute. Supposing we do this, one, two, three, one, two three, we have now taken sixseconds to play six notes and in so doing we have expended a certain amount of energy. Now supposing I put little tails on these and alter the time and say I am going to have three/eight instead of three/four, I am going to have three quaversand instead of saying 1,2,3, I am going to say 123, 123. in other words I am going to play them in half time. Now to do this I have to concentrate a bit more to get more energy into the explication of that music. I have to put energy down my arm. Supposing I put two tails on them, now I have got to play them twice as quick again. If I put three tails I am going to have to expend more energy, more alertness and go ( …, … )
Did somebody jump then?
When I do this, I expend energy and if I put lots of little lines on and then put at the beginning of the music, terribly, awfully very fast by request of the composer, then we can very, very hot when we are doing it. We might do this when we are pretending to be petuniasin the Children’s Hour and rush rapidly about the room, with somebody saying, “And don’t forget to plant yourselfin every little hole when you come to it. Now this makes the children very hot.
Now we can put hemi, demi, semi, hemi semi, demi quavers, punct drawled tremor when we try to do it. In other words if I start trying to keep upwith the conceivable notes………
Actually there is a very clever fellow in the next world, he leftthis world a few years ago, Simon Bahrraer and he could play that kind of piano music perfectly, with every note clearand articulated correctly, and phrased far better than anyone else I have heard, but he was expending energy. And we must bear this in mind, we have space, time and energy expended. This allows us to analyse the music in terms of space, time, power. Here is the space, this way is the time, and the amount of energy you use in hitting each note, called by the musicians the dynamic, means how hard do you strike it. You make strike a note very, if you are doing a very comic type of German waltz, you do a waltz like 123,123, 123 you strike the first note very strongly and the other two less strongly. If you are doing four in the baar you strike the first one strongly, the third one not quite as strongly, the second one less strongly and the fourth one least strongly. If you count your four with all the notes equally, counting one two three four, one, two, three, four with no stress accent on them, you are squaring your music. Now beginners in conducting are often told not to beat squarely in this way. We have toremember that we are expending energy through time over space.
Track 3
Now let us consider what we have to say about time. Here is the word time, and we see that it reads in the opposite direction, emit. This is a reference to the energy that is released every moment by any existential observer of time. In other words you cannot observe time without releasing energy moment by moment. So time, as experienced by human beings depends on energy emission by those human beings.
If you don’t emit any energy at all from your central energy store, through the brain, down certain nerves to certain organs, then you will not perceive anything. If you become abstracted in your inner processes you do not send energy to your external sense organs but you do send energy from your brain centres tospecific memory storage placed to energise memory images. You do this in dreams and in dreamless sleep you do something else. But you are still expending energy as long as you exist.
Now we see that the problem of space and time is related in this way. The musical notation and the staves show us a very simple representation of it. But now let us look at another thing.
If I look down the room from where I am, I am over here and the rest of the room is like this, and a lot of people over here,now I cannot with this physical eye focus sharply on a very large area. It is quite a small areathat I focus on. So I am going to imagine that I am looking at this group of people like this, but only a very narrow channel of vision is in focus and the rest of it here is more or less out of focus. There is one part of the eye that will hold everything in very, very sharp focus and right on the periphery of the eye and the rest of the eye is not so sharply focussed and right on the periphery of the eyeit is very much out of focus, but it has a peculiar quality. The part that is most closely in focus gives me the sharpest formal definition at the expense of making the image static. You can experiment in your spare time with this. But where you are sharply in focus and can define the form accurately, there the thing is static; but where the periphery is, where you are vague, you are very conscious of movement So if some obliging people start wiggling about or being irritated or scratching or turning their heads, my eyeis very aware of the movement but with no sharp formal focus. This has a survival utility value for animals and for human beings because your periphery being wired to movement detection centres in the brain means that any moving object that is out of focus will attract your attention and you will be able to become aware of that as a potential threat to existence or a potential point of interestand you can then rapidly switch your eye to it to see if it is a danger potential or a delight potential. And if it is a matter of no moment to you, you can turn back and continue your focus elsewhere.
Now this is very important because we are going to talk about the here and the now and how important it is. Remember important means we are importing our energies into the time-space-power situation.
If I deliberately don’t focus on any particular person, by putting my eyes not focussed on anybody in particular, I am still aware of the crowd of people there, but I can’t see at the moment and particular features because I am focussed on the point in the air, and I am busy watching the little movement of the molecules of air in so far as they interfere by their peculiar refractive index, with the light display. And when I do this so that I comprehend the whole room’s content in this one moment by not focussing. Then, if I focus on a particular person sharply and keeping a sharp focus, I want to look at the rest of the room I must scan. So if I look at Sal in one second and want to see sharper in focus to compare her with Abel. Why I should do this I don’t know, I must now turn my eye and look at Abel sharply in another second, and then at Claire, who is sitting very upright and this takes me three seconds. And when I do this, for the time being I have lost formal consciousness of the remainder of the people in the room and they have all become blurred. But if they move, I will become aware of the movement and I may take a quick flip to see who is moving, and why, or I might ignore it according to the character of the movement. If it is a curvaceous movement and not sudden staccato and not straight line-ish, I will not normally interpret it as aggression, but it could be, if he is a very cunning person. He may know that a fox will walk round a field to catch a rabbit in curves which do not startle, gradually reducing the diameter of its circle, until it is walking round the rabbit within a foot. And the rabbit has watched it like this, and because there was no straight, aggressive line it has not been scared. So we must allow the possibility that a curvaceous mover over there might be curvaceously throwing a boomerang. Still we don’t expect it here so we can statistically ignore it.
Now observe, that when I expend energy in sharp focus on one thing, I exclude for the time being, a sharp focus on the rest of reality and in order to see another thing in equal sharp focus I must turn my eyes and the turning of my eyes takes time.
Track 4
Now let us draw this. Supposing here is a lady, you can always tell a lady, that’s a lady, and here is a gentleman. Now observe that if you focus on this one, this one goes relatively out of focus, and if you decide to compare that one with this and look at this, then that one goes relatively out of focus. But you can retain an image of this in your memory and overlap it with this one in your memory and thus compare them. If they were exactly congruent, there would be no difference in the images and there would be little point in making the comparison.
Now observe another thing, that these two occupy different spaces just as surely as the different notes on the musical stave occupy different spaces. So this again is a space-time diagram. If I were to say that is the note E and that is the note G, then I would say I will spend one crochet time looking at that one and the next crochet in that one, but there is a gap between.
Now it takes time to turn my eye from this curly-headed lady, through space to contemplate this straight headed gentleman, so that I am looking at the A figure, then the space, then the B. This is very important in music because it means I have got to come in at A and then at B. at a certain point in time, I must cut my A’s end off a bit to allow me time to traverse the space to get onto B. And I can stretch the space a little bit, delay the B, or I can shorten the spaces, anticipate the B and sensitively to this kind of thing often makes the difference to good and bad phrasing.
Track 5
Now, let us use the story of the little fellow who is up from the country, with a plum-coloured, long hairy suit on, this is a real person I am describing, andhe comes up from darkest Staffordshire. He comes up once in three months and his pocket is fat with his wallet, and he goes into some place of amusement, and he is looking around, very slowly, in a manner like an old-fashioned bucolic, now very rare; and there is a little weasel gentleman with a sharp nose and very sharp eyes, with a partner of course, and this bucolic gentleman is looking very slowly at all these unfamiliar things because the pace of his mentation, his mental process, is relatively slow, because in the environment from which he comes, change is slow. But, in the city environment of these little pick-pockets, changes are quicker and they get more practice. Also, their peculiar occupation helps them to accelerate their rate of perception, so they actually perceive more percepts per second than he does.
So they see that he has come in, with his long, hairy suit on, actually. They look at his boots, they look at his slow way of looking round, they see his fat pocket, they see him pat it slowly and reassuringly and they quickly work out he has been saving up. They think very quickly at their course of campaign, A says to B, “You nip round the other side, bump into him accidentally, apologize and start straightening his coat for him and while you are doing this on the one side I will go to the other side and remove his wallet.” Now they are putting in more percepts per second into their activity, than he is.
So in Christ’s terminology they are what is called “quick” and in Christ’s terminology he is called “dead.” That is to say he has a relatively static and slow-paced mental process.